Middle Eastern Realities

Ronald Reagan vs. Barack Obama; a matter of life and death

Phil Boehmke

Today we celebrate the Ronald Reagan Centennial. Revisionists on the left
have been busy reinterpreting and recasting the life of President Reagan in an
attempt to explain his continued popularity. Time magazine photo-shopped President Reagan with his hand on Barack Obama’s
shoulder for last week’s cover in a curious attempt to link the two polar
opposites.

The gulf that separates Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama cannot be bridged by
media hype and superficial comparisons. Perhaps no issue defines the differences
between President Reagan and Mr. Obama more closely than their views on
abortion. Last month Barack Obama marked the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade by
re-affirming his unyielding support of abortion. During his lack-luster career
in the Illinois Senate, Mr. Obama revealed his extreme and radical pro-abortion
agenda.

On March 30, 2001, Obama was the only Illinois senator who rose to speak
against a bill that would have protected babies who survive late-term
labor-induced abortions…Obama rose to object that if the bill passed, and a
nine-month-old fetus survived a late-term labor-induced abortion was deemed to
be a person who had the right to live, then the law would “forbid abortions to
take place.” Obama further explained the equal protection clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment does not allow somebody to kill a child, so if the law
deemed a child who survived a late-term abortion had a right to live, “then this
would be an anti-abortion statute.” [1]

In stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s radical views on abortion, Ronald Reagan
as a Christian, believed in the sanctity of life and sought ways to educate and
convince pro-abortion supporters to consider the rights of the unborn. In The
Reagan Diaries the president relates that he had received a wire from a woman in
Peoria, Il in response to his State of the Union speech. The woman was unhappy
with his stance on abortion and felt that he wanted to take away her freedom of
choice. Rather than write a response, President Reagan called her on the
telephone and explained that “there were 2 people‘s rights involved in
abortion-the mother‘s & the unborn child.” After what he termed “a nice
visit,” the woman promised to give the matter further thought. Ronald Reagan
noted that “I think I made a friend.” [2]

During his presidency Ronald Reagan was impressed with the new ultra-sound
procedure and predicted that the new technology would have a powerful impact on
the abortion issue. In a meeting with leaders from the Right to Life movement he
viewed a short film which showed an ultra-sound of an actual abortion being
performed. President Reagan related that the Doctor who had performed the
abortion (and some 10,000 others) was so moved by the evidence that he joined
the pro-life movement. He wrote in his diary “The movie (28 minutes long) was
most impressive & how anyone could deny that the fetus is a living human
being is beyond me.” [3]

Of course President Reagan never met Barack Obama. Standing in stark and
bloody contrast to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Obama was never swayed by evidence which
would assert that a fetus is “a living human being.”

More than once, Obama heard Illinois nurse Jill Stanek testify before the
Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee, relating the following story of an aborted
Down syndrome baby who survived a late-term induced-labor abortion and was
abandoned in the hospital’s Soiled Utility Room because the baby’s parents did
not want to hold him. “I couldn’t bear the thought of this child lying alone in
a Soiled Utility Room,” Stanek testified before Obama’s committee in the
Illinois Senate. “So I cradled him and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he
lived.” Stanek reported Obama was “unfazed” by the testimony. [4]

Ronald Reagan embraced life and had a confident and simple way of
expressing the importance of each life. On July 6, 1983 he wrote:

Nancy’s Birthday! Life would be miserable if there wasn’t a Nancy’s
birthday. What if she’d never been born. I don’t want to think about that.
[5]

On Ronald Reagan’s 100th Birthday if we pause to ask, what if he had never
been born? The response would clearly be, “I don’t want to think about that.”
The United States of America was truly blessed to have had President Ronald
Reagan at the helm for eight wonderful years.

Republican congressional
candidate says violent overthrow of government is ‘on the table’

12:00 AM CDT on Friday, October
22, 2010

By MELANIE MASON / The Dallas
Morning News
mmason@dallasnews.com

WASHINGTON – Republican
congressional candidate Stephen Broden stunned his party Thursday, saying
he would not rule out violent overthrow of the government if elections did not
produce a change in leadership.

In a rambling exchange during a TV interview, Broden, a South Dallas
pastor, said a violent uprising “is not the first option,” but it is “on
the table.” That drew a quick denunciation from the head of the Dallas County
GOP, who called the remarks “inappropriate.”

In the interview, Brad
Watson, political reporter for WFAA-TV (Channel 8), asked
Broden about a tea party event last year in Fort
Worth in which he described the nation’s government as
tyrannical.

“We have a constitutional remedy,” Broden said then. “And the Framers say if
that don’t work, revolution.”

Watson asked if his definition of revolution included violent overthrow of
the government. In a prolonged back-and-forth, Broden at first declined to
explicitly address insurrection, saying the first way to deal with a repressive
government is to “alter it or abolish it.”

“If the government is not producing the results or has become destructive to
the ends of our liberties, we have a right to get rid of that government and to
get rid of it by any means necessary,” Broden said, adding the nation was
founded on a violent revolt against Britain’s
King George III.

Watson asked if violence would be in option in 2010, under the current
government.

“The option is on the table. I don’t think that we should remove anything
from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms,” Broden said,
without elaborating. “However, it is not the first option.”

Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 06:13 PM ET

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.

Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

“Useful idiots” was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.

In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

The president’s poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.

But our government is supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men.”

If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without “due process of law.”

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in constitutional government.

And, without constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a “crisis” — which, as the president’s chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to “go to waste” as an opportunity to expand the government’s power.

That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country’s wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard’s restrictions on the printing of money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law “for the relief of the German people.”

That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people — indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.

If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.

The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP’s money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed “czars” controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.

Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power — vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom — are the “useful idiots” of our time. But useful to whom?